A poem a day is the poet way!

lost kingdom

I’m trying to listen to you and to everyone else
in this warren in Chengdu: this is, apparently,
real China, your words, where people actually
buy things. I have my fingers combing through
red cords ending with various carvings in cinnabar,
gifts to take home and something for myself.

I only want dragons, I told you. When I wanted to buy
another rubbing, you said, Are you sure you wantto be that person—who went to China and nowyour house is full of Chinese art? I held out
one silk cord pulled from the many and said,what is this? And you asked the woman, who

replied to you in Mandarin. You said, it’s basicallysome kind of dragon, and that was that. Now,
the house is cold because the sky has decided
that March means the last of winter. It’s quiet,
not that it was loud when you lived here. This
was both before and after you lived in Chengdu.

I think about you when I’m at Target, touching
the jewelry and thinking of the adornments I meant
to buy when we were there, and didn’t. I mean
to call you but don’t. You took us to Four Girls
Mountain mainly because you were sick of going
to museums, for which I can’t fault you.

But that guesthouse where, on the one hand,
we felt we were sleeping in outhouses, but
where, on the other hand, the little brothers
or distant cousins of the Himalayas rose
just outside the window. Where we ate noodles
in a room just off the street and a charcoal fire

burned with grilled meat. Where the oxen
took the main road in town and the cat snoozed
in the cigarette display case. I brought back
only a small bag of saffron and feared
it would be forbidden, so I told no one.
Elsewhere, in museums, you bargained

with artists for their work. One, with blossom
falling over a field of more blossom, or maybe
they’re ducks. Another, fine paper cut work
of a river and a tiled roof house. Just one dragon
on the wall, and the dragon I wear sometimes,
the red cord cinched by beads up into the

hollow of my throat. I want to ask you,
do you remember the egrets on the other side
of the Brocade River? That’s the English
translation, who knows what its name was
in Mandarin. Remember the purple lights
that gleamed on the water from the underside

of the bridges? We walked down a street of
restaurants and stalls where students ate,
the music leaking out from the clubs, all
the young men and young women dressed
for dancing. All the questions I would have liked
to ask I was afraid to—like, what would you

be doing tonight if we weren’t here? When I
admire things that you’ve spent a year practicing
not seeing, does it make you impatient? What,
to you, seems sacred here? Like the stupas
up there in the mountains, where Jiarong
Tibetans live, the houses with red-painted

ridges and scrolled and flowered shutters.
The prayer flags stretched from eave to ground.
The filthy window near the top of the stupas
through which one can see a small icon
of the boddhisatva. What about that?
or the high mountains themselves? But

you’re in no mood for these questions, at least
not now, not at this remove, when you’re not
helping me look for dragons down this trap
of a mall, real China, or in fact anywhere
near me at all. You’re now living your life in the
GD woods, as you say, and who’s going to stop you?

Not me. I know it’s your life to live, and I
will not burden you with my memory or
the fact that I miss you, nor the fact that I
have built a tiny cairn of ever smaller stones
on the ledge of the stupa, one that helps me
find a way back to summer when there

was snow, still, tracing the paths and the girl
at the guest house told me to put on more
clothes so I would not be so cold, where
the broth and noodles were flavorless but
the breakfast, its hard bread and the three
small eggs she cradled in her hand, charmed us.

To this trip and your voice translating every
single thing that happened, the things
that happened in words and all the things
we saw. How you helped me find one last
dragon tangled in a knot of silk cords, how
despite the fact that I was slow, you made sure

I reached the top of the impossible stairs,
caught my breath in the high tower,
looked over the mountains stretching
far beyond, the air dense and particulate;
felt the mountain as the arching, twisting
spine of a serpent body filled with fire.